Introduction to Chapter 3

After making a solid case for the end of democracy, the author moves in chapter three to explore the beneficiaries interested in maintaining the status quo. In a world driven increasingly by financial markets that know no borders, the forces which have a stake in maintaining the status quo are far greater than the forces struggling to establish a just social order.

Here the author exposes the corporate interest along other interests in maintaining the status quo. At the same time the author introduces the alternative and shows how the alternative is a direct threat to the pro-convoluted-democracy elites.

The author explains relation between the governing mechanisms and the human need for deep inner satisfaction.

Compared to the real inner peace that human beings long for, the corporate world provides opportunities such as Disney Land, or basketball and football games. They have replaced the great Roman circuses for the modern day King and his minions in Washington on the one hand and turned human beings into voyeurs and escapists on the other. These alternatives have become good tools for the government to distract public attention from real issues. At the same time, they provide an artificial excitement which never satiates the human soul.

The modern culture of the "civilized world," fully sponsored by the corporate sector and promoted by corporate media, forces human being to be more and more inhuman. The signs are all around us. From glamorizing extreme sex to extreme fighting, it seems as if everything pushes society to the negative extreme. The sport called "extreme fighting," has been drawing sell-out crowds across the US.13 People love to see blood really flowing. Is it not what Roman Kings used to watch? When interviewed by CNN, spectators who even brought their children said they wanted to "see blood."14 In this age of the corporation, entertainment has replaced real moral values.

Corporate world thrives in an environment that promotes individualism and democracy further legitimizes all inhuman aspects of materialism. Fears that were associated with the communist world have joined fears of the capitalist world. According to Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz: "In a liberal-capitalist economy fear of lack of money, fear of losing one’s job, fear of slipping down one rung on the social ladder all spurred the individual to greater effort. But what exists in the [Communist] Imperium is naked fear."15 The fears invented by the corporate media to serve various objectives of the establishment as well as the corporate worlds far outweighed the "naked fear" of the communist regimes. Combined with the godlessness of secularism, it empties the human being from within. "Today man believes that there is nothing in him, so he accepts anything, even if he knows it to be bad, in order to find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone."16

The author shows that not democratic values or the public opinion but markets, money, and the media now work in tandem to allow substantial change in institutional arrangements and policies only where this will serve the larger corporate interest presented as the "national interest." Ordinary citizens gradually lose interest in the election game, cynically write off politics and politicians, and withdraw from the political arena. The decreasing voter’s turnover is an indicator of this trend.

Many Western analysts, such as Bernard Cassen, have pointed out that the rules of international behavior and policy under EC, GATT, and IMF do not pretend to serve a human community. The financial forces control the governing mechanism all over the world and aggressively confront any challenge to the status quo they want to maintain.

The list of inequalities — from unequal taxes, to unequal privacy, unequal wealth, unequal trade, unequal media, unequal regulation, unequal responsibility for crime, unequal protection from risk, and unequal citizenship and access to the commons — is so long and their impact so pervasive that common man finds it very hard to pierce through the fog of misconceptions and assess how much enslaving and repressive a godless system could be.

After discussing various aspects of how the US model of democracy is exploited by vested interests, the author ends the chapter with comments: "If democracy in US could turn to tyranny in less than 250 years, there is no guarantee that another thousand years will stabilize a system that ignores frailties of human nature and bases everything on human reason and rationality."

It further builds the case for an alternative model of governance along with highlighting the issues that the alternative model has to address. Without addressing the core issues, any alternative will find itself as crippled as any of the governance systems tried so far.